- van Creveld, Martin.
Hitler in Hell.
Kouvola, Finland: Castalia House, 2017.
ASIN B0738YPW2M.
-
Martin
van Creveld is an Israeli military theorist and historian,
professor emeritus at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and author
of seventeen books of military history and strategy, including
The Transformation of War,
which has been hailed as one of the most significant recent works
on strategy. In this volume he turns to fiction, penning the
memoirs of the late, unlamented Adolf Hitler from his current
domicile in Hell, “the place to which the victors assign
their dead opponents.” In the interest of concision, in
the following discussion I will use “Hitler” to
mean the fictional Hitler in this work.
Hitler finds Hell more boring than hellish—“in some
ways it reminds me of Landsberg Prison”. There is no
torture or torment, just a never-changing artificial light and
routine in which nothing ever happens. A great disappointment
is that neither Eva Braun nor Blondi is there to accompany him.
As to the latter, apparently all dogs go to heaven.
Rudolf Hess
is there, however, and with that 1941 contretemps over the flight to
Scotland put behind them, has resumed helping Hitler with his
research and writing as he did during the former's 1924
imprisonment. Hell has broadband!—Hitler is even able
to access the “Black Internetz” and read, listen to,
and watch everything up to the present day. (That sounds
pretty good—my own personal idea of Hell would be an
Internet connection which only allows you to read Wikipedia.)
Hitler tells the story of his life: from childhood, his
days as a struggling artist in Vienna and Munich,
the experience of the Great War, his political awakening
in the postwar years, rise to power, implementation of
his domestic and foreign policies, and the war and final
collapse of Nazi Germany. These events, and the people involved
in them, are often described from the viewpoint of the present
day, with parallels drawn to more recent history and figures.
What makes this book work so well is that van Creveld's Hitler
makes plausible arguments supporting decisions which many
historians argue were irrational or destructive: going to war
over Poland, allowing the British evacuation from Dunkirk,
attacking the Soviet Union while Britain remained
undefeated in the West, declaring war on the U.S. after Pearl
Harbor, forbidding an orderly retreat from Stalingrad, failing
to commit armour to counter the Normandy landings, and fighting
to the bitter end, regardless of the consequences to Germany
and the German people. Each decision is justified with arguments
which are plausible when viewed from what is known of Hitler's
world view, the information available to him at the time, and
the constraints under which he was operating.
Much is made of those constraints. Although embracing totalitarianism
(“My only regret is that, not having enough time, we did not
make it more totalitarian still”), he sees himself surrounded
by timid and tradition-bound military commanders and largely
corrupt and self-serving senior political officials, yet
compelled to try to act through them, as even a dictator can
only dictate, then hope others implement his wishes. “Since
then, I have often wondered whether, far from being too ruthless,
I had been too soft and easygoing.” Many apparent blunders
are attributed to lack of contemporary information, sometimes
due to poor intelligence, but often simply by not having the
historians' advantage of omniscient hindsight.
This could have been a parody, but in the hands of a
distinguished historian like the author, who has been thinking
about Hitler for many years (he wrote his 1971 Ph.D. thesis on
Hitler's Balkan strategy in World War II), it provides a serious
look at how Hitler's policies and actions, far from being
irrational or a madman's delusions, may make perfect sense when
one starts from the witches' brew of bad ideas and ignorance
which the real Hitler's actual written and spoken words
abundantly demonstrate. The fictional Hitler illustrates this
in many passages, including this particularly chilling one
where, after dismissing those who claim he was unaware of the
extermination camps, says “I particularly needed to
prevent the resurgence of Jewry by exterminating every last
Jewish man, woman, and child I could. Do you say they were
innocent? Bedbugs are innocent! They do what nature has
destined them to, no more, no less. But is that any reason
to spare them?” Looking backward, he observes that
notwithstanding the utter defeat of the Third Reich, the
liberal democracies that vanquished it have implemented many
of his policies in the areas of government supervision of
the economy, consumer protection, public health (including
anti-smoking policies), environmentalism, shaping the
public discourse (then, propaganda, now political correctness),
and implementing a ubiquitous surveillance state of which the
Gestapo never dreamed.
In an afterword, van Creveld explains that, after on several
occasions having started to write a biography of Hitler and then
set the project aside, concluding he had nothing to add to
existing works, in 2015 it occurred to him that the one
perspective which did not exist was Hitler's own, and that the
fictional device of a memoir from Hell, drawing parallels
between historical and contemporary events, would provide a
vehicle to explore the reasoning which led to the decisions
Hitler made. The author concludes, “…my goal was
not to set forth my own ideas. Instead, I tried to understand
Hitler's actions, views, and thoughts as I think he, observing
the past and the present from Hell, would have explained them.
So let the reader judge how whether I have succeeded in this
objective.” In the opinion of this reader, he has
succeeded, and brilliantly.
This book is presently available only in a
Kindle edition; it is free for Kindle
Unlimited subscribers.
July 2017 